About Me

I am a roboticist working at the intersection of machine learning, planning and decision-making, and imitation learning.
If it’s a challenging problem that would make robots more useful for someone out there, I am most likely interested.

I am currently an engineer at Apple in the Special Projects Group.

Before that, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de
Lausanne (EPFL) in the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory, working with
Prof. Aude Billard.

I completed a PhD in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University.
My research focused on applying imitation learning techniques to difficult decision-making problems in robotics.
My thesis was on getting robots to understand natural-language directions in unstructured unknown environments.

Collaborators, past and present.

I’ve been lucky to work with some amazing people, listed below in (roughly) most-to-least recent order below.

Other interests

Besides enabling robots to do cool and useful things, I am a big fan of mountains.

I’ve been lucky to climb in a variety of places around the world;
some highlights have been in
Switzerland (Eiger, Matterhorn),
France (around Chamonix),
Canada (Bugaboos),
Wyoming (Pingora, Gannett Peak),
and Morocco (Mt. Toubkal).

More recently, I’ve gotten interested in Ski Touring and Ski Mountaineering, and in 2016 completed the mythical Haute Route ski tour through France, Italy, and Switzerland.